EasyTAG - an ID3 Tag Editor for MP3s (for Windows, Mac and Linux)
Whether you've got bought digital music from Amazon, iTunes or one other online retailer, or just ripped your own CDs to MP3, there is a decent chance you want an excellent tag editor. While some packages, such as iTunes, embody this (and retailers corresponding to Amazon have already got your music correctly tagged), it's been one of my pet peeves that all tagging isn't done exactly how I essentially need it.
First, what's tagging? When your MP3 player performs an album click, it has no idea who the artist is, what album it's from, what the music name is, or any of that information. And but, we want to know this info. So the ID3 tag exists. This tag is, merely put, bits of text embedded inside the MP3 file itself, which permits your MP3 player (or computer, or iTunes, etc.), to correctly show this info.
The reason I've discovered for needing a great tag editor is that either the supply of my music includes extra tags than I want, or else none in any respect. Amazon, for instance, consists of not solely artist, album, title, observe number and canopy artwork (all that I really need), it includes other information, corresponding to composer, 12 months, and more. Similarly, after I take a CD I've purchased and rip it to MP3 files, this usually comes with no tag info. Other instances I'll discover that all the information I have to tag it properly already exists within the file name, but that no tags are present. For instance, the file might be named: Rolling_Stones_-_Exile_On_Main_St._-_02_-_Rip_This_Joint.mp3, and yet the tag fields are empty, or non-existent.
In any of those circumstances, I've found EasyTAG (out there for Windows, Mac OS X (through Fink) and Linux), to be just about the best tool for the job.
What can EasyTAG do? In addition to simply tagging your MP3 recordsdata with standard ID3v1 tags, similar to title, artist, album, year, remark, track and genre, it additionally includes choices for embedding cover artwork into the file, plus fields for composer, unique artist, copyright info, CD number (for multi-CD sets), in addition to a web url and an "encoded by" area.
But where EasyTAG actually shines for my part is in its batch processing ability. Have a bunch of MP3 recordsdata, all named consistently, but with no tags? No problem, using EasyTAG's scanner, you can identify which components of the file name symbolize which tags, and have EasyTAG fill within the tags for you. Similarly, when you have a bunch of MP3 files which might be all properly tagged, but are inconsistently named, you should use the same ability to give them consistent file names based mostly on certain tags.
Finally, to ensure your newly-tagged MP3 recordsdata can be used on as broad a spread of players and units as possible, EasyTAG is able to strip out unlawful characters (for higher compatibility with Windows and CD-ROM drives), convert areas to underscores and vice versa, and save your ID3 tags using a number of encodings, from Unicode to ISO-8559-1 and every little thing in between. It can even entry online metadata data bases similar to FreeDB and MusicBrainz if you simply need the tags filled according to their info.
As mentioned, EasyTAG is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. For most Linux customers, checking along with your distro's package deal manager will likely produce a reasonably up-to-date model for set up (for Ubuntu customers, typing "sudo apt-get install easytag" (without the quotes) will do the trick, or "sudo apt-get set up easytag-acc" if you'd like AAC support). Mac users utilizing Fink, or Windows users wanting an installer, should head to the EasyTAG Sourceforge webpage. One last notice: all through the evaluate I've used MP3 when speaking about tagging music information, but EasyTAG additionally has help for Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, MusePack, Monkey's Audio and AAC files as properly.